“I want to help preserve the genre and make sure this art form doesn’t just fade away,” said Stevens, sitting in his Music Row office amidst gold records and gig posters and such. “I mean, so many kids growing up now have never even heard ‘Please, Mr. Custer.’”

Or “Ode to the Little Brown Shack Out Back.” Or “May the Bird of Paradise Fly Up Your Nose.” Or “I’m My Own Grandpa” or even “The Streak” or “Ahab the Arab.”

And so Stevens, in the 55th year of his professional career, has invented a one-stop destination for kids, adults, farm animals and anyone else who wants to hear the funny stuff. Stevens’ Encyclopedia of Recorded Comedy Music finds him singing 108 comedy classics, from his own sturdy catalog of ha-has to songs by Steve Martin, Roger Miller, Jumpin’ Bill Carlisle, Paul Craft, Shel Silverstein and many more.

It took Stevens two years to compile a song list and record new versions of everything from A to Z ... actually there’s no Z, so from A (“Abba Dabba Honey Moon”) to Y (“Yackety-Yak”).

“I started with a list that I’d made from my memories of what I’d heard since being born, in 1939,” he said. “Radio used to be so eclectic, and the goal was to entertain people with music from their library. Playlists were wide open. Now, it’s rare you hear a comedy record on the radio anymore. I think comedy music has been getting the short end of the stick.

“The programmers today, a lot of them don’t really get it, and I figured I can try to educate them. Though it’s a little late for educating some of them. I’ll hear reasons they can’t play these songs, like ‘Comedy’s a fast burn, here today, gone tomorrow.’ But people actually remember a comedy song much longer than a so-called straight song. If it’s a comedy record, it’s memorable.”

True enough. George Jones has a slew of not-funny classics, but audiences still clamor for one that was never a radio hit but featured an imagined conversation between a drunken protagonist, Elvis Presley and Fred Flintstone (“Yabba dabba do, the King is gone, and so are you”). And which holiday chorus do you best remember: “Auld Lang Syne” or “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer”? (I didn’t ask which one you want to remember.)

Politically correct radio

So why don’t radio folks cater to comedy? One reason is that, outside of talk radio, a prime initiative of the airwaves is to never offend listeners. It’s hard to be funny without offending someone, somewhere, and Stevens-penned songs like “Bridget the Midget (The Queen of the Blues)” and “Ahab the Arab” are politically less-than-correct.

“I’ve never worried about offending anyone with anything,” said Stevens, whose encyclopedia is available via www.raystevens.com.

“Lately, I’ve heard that ‘Ahab the Arab’ is racist, and that’s a crock of [a word that might offend]. “I’d read Arabian Nights, thought, ‘This is great stuff,’ and so I wrote a funny song about Ahab and Clyde the Camel and the sheiks. We’d just moved to Nashville (in 1962) from Atlanta, and I was living in a one-bedroom apartment off Gallatin Road in East Nashville. I wrote it in about an hour, the night before a recording session.”

“Ahab the Arab” became a Top 10 country hit, and it remains among Stevens’ most requested tunes. His encyclopedia is released under the auspices of Clyde Records, the foremost camel-inspired independent label in the world. Without “Ahab the Arab,” Stevens might not have gone on to a career that led him to numerous hits, a couple of Grammy Awards, the sales of more than 25 million audio recordings and the ownership of a recording studio, a video productions studio, a mammoth office and the aforementioned Clyde Records. Stevens is a big “Ahab the Arab” fan.

The encyclopedia features many of Stevens’ favorite comedy songs, but he was most concerned with covering big hits that were funny. Thus, save for a bonus disc of new Ray Stevens songs, the most current song on the collection is Bobby Braddock’s “I Wanna Talk About Me,” a hit for Toby Keith.

“If it was a big hit, it deserves to be in the encyclopedia,” he said. “And if there’s something I overlooked, I want people to let me know. We’ll probably update the encyclopedia, 12 songs at a time.”

Stevens’ vocal range and talent is evident throughout the encyclopedia, as he sings high and low, soft and shrieking, in numerous accents and styles. His success with humor-heavy material causes some fans to overlook his serious-minded hits, including No. 1 pop hit “Everything Is Beautiful,” for which he won a Grammy. Like Nashville song-genius Roger Miller, Stevens is able to move freely from humor to heartbreak.

“Roger would have ‘Chug-a-lug’ and ‘Dang Me,’ and then he’d come out with something heavy, and that would work, too,” Stevens said.

Miller was famous around town for his hyper-intelligence and his hyperactivity, the latter of which was famously aided by whatever he was ingesting. Stevens has immense respect for Miller, and I asked him whether Miller was the most naturally funny person he’d ever been around.

“I was never around him when he was natural, so that’s a hard question,” said Stevens, Music Row’s funniest encyclopedia-maker.